Cherokee County, Iowa, supervisors voted 5–0 on Aug. 26 to approve a battery storage ordinance, undoing an indefinite moratorium passed March 24 and clearing a path for an $80 million solar-plus-storage project on 160 acres of sixth-generation farmland.

The project, developed with Indiana-based Nomad Infrastructure, pairs 30 megawatts of elevated, cattle-friendly solar with a 25-megawatt/100-megawatt-hour battery built from modular containerized units on roughly an acre and a half. The Smith family, three brothers farming in the county of 11,000, proposed the plan after depressed corn prices pushed them to diversify.

"We're trying to diversify into another revenue stream. The cattle business is really good right now, and grain has been not as good," Mark Smith said. "With solar, we can put cornfields back to pasture. Solar revenue plus cattle revenue makes it work."

The economics depend on lifting panels above grazing cattle — a configuration that only recently reached commercial scale at a 40-acre, 3-megawatt Silicon Ranch site in Tennessee. Batteries were added to defray the extra cost.

Why did the county ban batteries in the first place?

When supervisors learned of the storage component, they approved the moratorium — one of a wave of local bans on lithium-ion projects nationwide. The technology has gone from niche to the largest source of on-demand power under construction in the U.S. in about a decade, and communities are grappling with real and perceived fire risks.

The moratorium jeopardized tens of millions of dollars in financing the developers had secured from investment banks. It passed without the usual multiple readings and lacked a specified time frame — grounds for a possible legal challenge. The Smiths chose persuasion instead.

Who flipped the vote?

Supervisor Shane Bellefy cast the lone vote against the moratorium and then built the case for reversal. A banker by trade, he pitched the project's fiscal upside: an investment above $80 million generating $60,000 to $80,000 in new annual county tax revenue.

"Land in Iowa is our No. 1 asset. It's a row-crop state, cow-calf operations — it's what we do," Bellefy said. "We don't have the ability in certain areas, especially in rural Iowa, to just attract skyscrapers or 400-people housing developments."

He also leaned on the Private Property Rights Institute, a conservative nonprofit launched in 2024 that backed 165 candidates that year — including Bellefy — and is engaged in nearly 200 races this cycle.

"We want to get rid of regulations," said executive director Charlie Kolean. "If people own their property and they're going to operate on it responsibly, they should be able to build what they want on their property."

How were safety concerns answered?

The fears had a concrete reference point: the Vistra battery plant at Moss Landing, California, which forced evacuations during a lengthy fire in early 2025 and saw a second blaze last month among stranded battery packs.

Luke Seabberg of Iowa State University's extension program ran a battery fundamentals workshop for the board in February and returned to a May public meeting. He told supervisors the industry has moved to safer lithium-iron-phosphate chemistry, adopted safety codes that did not exist when Moss Landing was built, and shifted to modular containers that contain fires. The local fire chief also addressed circulating concerns, Bellefy said.

What happens next?

The county zoning board's initial draft imposed wide-ranging setbacks that Bellefy argued would choke project economics and the tax revenue with them. "If the financial institution is fine with it, and the insurance institution is fine with insuring it, I know that their regulations are way heavier than ours," he told fellow supervisors. "If they're OK with it, and they're willing to put their skin on the line, how are we going to justify we're smarter than them?"

The interconnection position is favorable: the local rural electric cooperative has approved transmission, letting the project sell into the Midcontinent Independent System Operator grid, where data center growth is pushing demand to record highs while storage deployment lags.

Once the Smiths secure the remaining permissions, they plan to convert the parcel to grass in the spring and begin installing solar and batteries next fall. The milestone to watch is whether the county's ordinance — and the model it sets for other moratorium-bound jurisdictions — survives contact with actual construction.